


Ghosts of the Present

by randomlyimagine



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Child Death, Force Ghosts, Gen, Ghosts, Order 66, So be warned, Some fluff but mostly angst by far, That's Not How The Force Works, all of the character death is canonical, but there is A LOT of it, since this is an Order 66 AU where half the main characters are Force ghosts and all, the surviving children of the Jedi Order are raised by hundreds of ghosts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-10-19 06:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17595905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomlyimagine/pseuds/randomlyimagine
Summary: When Order 66 goes out, thousands of Jedi die within minutes, and the balance of the Force shifts quickly, drastically to the Dark.The Force warps and shudders. It loses the ability to reabsorb Force-sensitive souls after their deaths.Every single Jedi killed during Order 66 becomes a Force ghost, often before their bodies even hit the floor.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I've been working on in my spare time--for fun, oddly, given the topic. Which, yes, fyi, THIS IS VERY SAD. But it will also have hope. And hey, more people survive Order 66 than in canon, so...
> 
> No consistent update schedule, fyi, esp since I'm writing this out of order. I wasn't gonna post it for awhile, but I'm having kind of a weird week and honestly I could just use some external validation lol. So you get fic because my headspace is a bit down. So if you wanted to repay me for the early fic by leaving comments, that would frankly be awesome, because being unemployed sucks and honestly I could something to cheer me up.
> 
> Thanks to SapphiraBlue, my loyal beta. I'm sorry for making you sad.

When Order 66 goes out, Jedi die by the thousands. The sheer amount of Force-sensitive blood and souls spilling, across huge swaths of the Galaxy, is unheard of, unprecedented. And so are its effects.

Nearly ten thousand deaths within the space of an hour, all across the Galaxy, all releasing the energy, the emotion, the life, the concentration of the Force that had been bundled into delicate, organic bodes. The emotions of Force sensitives could leave imprints on the Force; their deaths, more so.

And when the Force unbalances, so starkly, in such an impossibly short amount of time, its fabric warps and fissures and cracks.

As a result, the Jedi who pass cannot become one with the Force. Even the ones who perish in the first few seconds, because the Force flows and ebbs and absorption into it is not instantaneous. And then the wave of deaths comes pouring in and in and in, a thousand in the first minute alone.

The ones who die soonest—they panic. No lifetime of Jedi emotional control can keep panic at bay in the face of not only betrayal and their own murders, but the feeling of their people being murdered all around them, yet impossibly distant, far too far to help.

Of the ones who die soonest, the ones most emotional, most instinctive in their Force use, they feel their blood turn crystal with fear as they realize, _This is a coup._ As they realize, _The Temple_.

And a small, small handful, in their panic and fear, in their longing, their duty and desire to help and protect—they move, as they did not know they could. And suddenly they are in the Temple.

Plo Koon is among them, shot down by his own men, his own surrogate sons, the second the Order was given. So too is Aayla Secura, while her corpse lies right in the middle of her troops, murdered by the man she loved.

They don’t yet know what happened. They don’t know how the men they loved, who loved them, who served and protected them for so long, could have betrayed them so entirely.

But it only takes one look around, at the blue-tinted, glowing faces around them, to realize they all met the same fate, and the Force whispers in affirmation.

“How—” is the first word spoken, once they start to arrive, but no one hears who said it. Possibly not even the speaker.

On the ground around them are the bodies of their people, and the ones they thought were their people: the Jedi and the clone troopers, lying broken on the floor.

Sidious had arranged the attack on the Temple to coordinate as closely as possible with the issuing of the Order, to ensure the devastation in the Force could not give the Jedi warning.

Aayla swallows. The fallen Jedi are mostly Knights; their arrangement clearly indicates they’d been a defensive line. A sentient barricade. One that had failed.

The fallen clones are from the 501st. Impossible, that this all could happen just after the defeat of Dooku, the supposed herald of their victory. Impossible, to think what must have happened to Skywalker, that his men are the ones laying waste to his home.

“Spread out.” Plo Koon commands, what feels like eons after that first broken utterance, but is in reality only seconds. “Find anyone still alive that you can. Find—” the word cuts off with a rasp. “Find anyone still alive. Find out if you can do anything to influence the physical world. Do anything you can to help them, if—they can see you. Scout, report back, guide them to safety. Lead any survivors to the base of them Temple and have them barricade themselves in.”

His voice sounds different, without the mask. Hard to die from oxygen poisoning when one is already dead.

What he does not say is that they might be helpless, left only to watch their people die.

There are only five of them, to cover the whole Temple. Wherever the others are, they don’t know, but none of the others have made it.

They split up. Plo Koon and Aayla Secura and take the Ziggurat itself. Master Imogen, Knight Fali’i, and Knight Mikelt split the towers between them.

Plo Koon and Aayla Secura haven’t even split up yet within the Ziggurat when they hit the battle lines. But perhaps _lines_ is generous: there are only a small handful of Knights and senior Padawans deflecting blaster bolts as they retreat from the advancing armada.

But between and behind and around the retreating Jedi are a series of figures, translucent and glowing blue.

Plo recognizes Siri Tachi, standing between the clones and a trio of Padawans, face set in cold determination as blaster bolts pass through her. Her corpse is one of the only ones guarding the entrance: she had given her life to hold off the clones while the everyone else had retreated, having realized they could not hold the position. Dozens and dozens of clone bodies lie splayed around hers, but nonetheless she had perished.

And Plo Koon knows that this deep in the war, she was one of the only Masters in the Temple at all.

Or _is_ one of the only Masters in the Temple, because somehow, like them, she is still present. Present and yelling warnings, retreat coordinates, strategies. It’s unclear whether any of the Jedi hear her—but one startles at her warning and ducks away from a blaster bolt that would otherwise have plowed through their shoulder, even as another fails to hear, and falls to the same barrage, a blaster hole straight over his heart.

And then he appears again: a male Twi’lek, blue where in life he had been purple, expression confused and shot through with a new horror.

“Knight Tachi!” Plo yells, and is abruptly meeting the eyes or sensory organs of all the translucent Jedi—the _ghosts_ , Plo finally admits to himself, and has no idea what to do with the admission except keep moving. The living Jedi, however, neither flinch nor waver: he and Aayla do not yet know how to make themselves visible, as Siri has somehow done. “Retreat into the depths of the Old Temple! The security measures will allow us to set up a barricade.”

The layout of the Jedi Temple is open, light, airy: built after the fall of the Sith, it was designed as a place for training and meditation, not a place to wage a war. And now the Jedi are paying the price.

But the Old Temple predates the main construction considerably.

Siri nods, expression fixed and fierce. “Retreat into the Old Temple!” she cries. “Retreat into the Old Temple, and the rest of you, pass the message to any other groups you can find!”

Aayla and Plo can feel the Force moving differently around her than it does around them, as the renewed wave of determination lets her call be heard by all of the living. But Plo and Aayla cannot quite tell how to replicate it, even as the other ghosts take off running—Plo and Aayla may have not figured out how to make themselves visible, but these Jedi have not figured out how to blink from one place to the next.

“I shall go too,” Aayla says, leaping after one of the scattering ghosts and starting to call for instructions on how to make herself visible.

“The creche!” Siri calls after her, “They bastards were heading toward the creche!” Aayla turns and nods before blinking out of sight, pulling her Zabrak companion with her through space and the Force.

Which leaves Plo, Siri, the recently dead Twi’lek, and seven Jedi still alive, none of them above Knight level. And about three hundred clones.

\--

The creche, when Aayla flickers back into reality, is already under siege. The creche itself consists of a circle of circular dormitory chambers, each holding individual bedrooms of four to six bunks, and the floors and beds and furniture around her are littered with tiny bodies.

The pain and horror of it, the echo of young death and potential, echoes in the Force. Aayla almost collapses, and her Zabrak companion, Trisn Shi-Eshi, does, briefly.

But twinkling in the Force are the glows of those lives not yet lost, and glowing in the next room are the burns of sabers, from the few children old enough to have them, desperately trying to deflect blaster bolts away from themselves and the cluster of smaller children behind them.

(Glowing all around them are the little, blue figures of the children lying dead on the floor, helpless and scared and throwing themselves bodily on— _through_ —the clones for lack of sabers, to no avail.)

In that moment, Aayla wishes nothing more than that she could touch the physical world, could rend the clones to shreds or move all of the children to safety, the way she had moved the Zabrak in with her. Because the children are losing, badly.

“The clones,” Aayla says, turning to Trisn. “Can you appear to them, or only Force sensitives?”

“I—” Trisn stutters, before regaining her resolve. “I don’t know. But I can try.”

“Good. Appear to them if you can, draw your focus. If you can avoid making it obvious that you’re already dead, they may attempt to strike at you as the larger threat.”

“Not to mention that they probably didn’t know we could turn into ghosts,” Trisn mutters ironically, the _Since we didn’t know either_ , echoing unsaid.

“Exactly,” Aayla says. “Before you do, tell them to have one child pass back a saber to cut through the wall with, and have the rest of them shield the efforts from sight. I will try to find someone still alive to bring here.” A handful of the Initiates are still alive, unconscious or playing dead, but they can’t help. If she can’t find someone, they might have to be left to die. “If you can’t hold out—” Aayla swallows. “Try and call me through the Force, I guess, and we’ll see if that works.”

Trisn nods solemnly and turns to the children, who startle as the Force flickers around her. Aayla turns and leaves, this time on foot.

\--

The chances of finding someone who can singlehandedly defeat dozens of soldiers, who is close enough to make it, are incredibly low. Everywhere Aayla goes, it seems, the bodies of her people are scattered on the floor, and if the clones lying dead around them outnumber the Jedi, it is cold comfort.

But somehow, some way, by some miracle of the Force, she finds someone. A Knight from a winged species is crouched against the ceiling in a corridor empty of living beings, but filled with the dead. The Knight, Gwiu Palarn, angles forward slowly, eyes on a swivel, trying to sneak over to the creche without getting spotted.

Aayla can’t ask for the Knight’s help if she can’t be heard. So she remembers the way the Force had flickered and warped around Siri, around Trisn, when they had appeared to the Jedi still living. More determined than she possibly has ever been, she presses her will onto the Force around her, but it slips through her grasp like water, like syrup, and she has to gather her will in a sphere around her to keep it from slipping away, to pour the Force itself into her spirit and distill her presence—

A squawk comes from the ceiling. Aayla breaks out in a heavy, exhausted grin.

“The way to the creche is clear,” she yells, “but it’s under siege! Follow me!”

Gwiu springs free of the ceiling and, with a strong beat of her wings, surges forward toward Aayla. “Then hurry!” she yells.

\--

By the time Aayla and Gwiu reach the creche, the circle of children has halved in size, retreated back toward the wall, the bodies of their fallen crechemates filling the space between them and Trisn, who is still holding their attention, if barely.

Gwiu lets out a piercing shriek of a battle cry and dives down at the front lines of the clones, her lightsaber deflecting bolts right up until the moment it plunges into the front lines of clones.

The two Initiates carving their way through the wall are almost through, each coming at it from the side. The soon-to-be hole is still out of sight, but only by virtue of the fact that it’s so low to the ground, the children will almost all have to crawl.

Trisn is still distracting the clones, trying to pull as much fire from Gwiu as possible as she carves a bloody swath through the soldiers, but that’s hard when she’s not the one actually hurting them.

“You can do it,” Aayla whispers to the children carving through the wall, unsure if she’s managing to make herself visible, or just heard. “Just a little bit longer.”

Then she pushes herself the rest of the way forward and calls to Gwiu, “Just a little bit longer, they’re almost through!”

Gwiu’s mouth quirks upward in a bitter smile. She has pushed the line of clones back, but only the slightest bit. It will make little difference. “And I shall see that every single one of them makes it,” she says.

What is unsaid: Gwiu will die in doing so, if not in attempting it.

Aayla aches to lead the children lying wounded, cowering, frozen on the floor over to the relative safety of the cluster against the wall. But the clones in the back or side of the mass will shoot the children as soon as they move, long before they can get close to an escape.

There are only five left alive outside the defensive cluster in the whole of the creche. Their chances are better if they play dead until the siege is over, and pray that someone survives to come get them. Aayla herself prays for it, begs the Force to let them just hold on, and she goes from child to child whispering reassurances and plans and as close to promises as she can get.

“ _Stay here_ ,” she whispers, trying not to cry. “ _It is your best shot of survival_ ,” she tells them. “ _Trust in the Force_ ,” and “ _we’ll be back for you_.”

And: “ _I am so, so sorry._ ”

\--

The children escape, what few of them remain—maybe thirty in total, only seven from the defensive ring, the ones who have already earned their lightsabers. Gwiu holds them off as long as she can, until the last one is through, and then grabs at the Force and brings down the ceiling on the clone army, and on herself. Her last expression is that same bitter smile, and it’s still sitting on her face when her spirit appears, blue and glowing with triumph.

One of the five surviving, waiting children is crushed in the collapse. Aayla refuses to let herself cry, even as the child’s ghost appears, face still contorted in the pain of his last moments.

“I am so, so sorry,” Aayla whispers, bending down to try and hug him.

She can’t.

“We have to keep moving,” Trisn says. And she’s right: the children will need guidance to make it down to the lower levels, especially if they are to do so without being spotted.

They desperately, desperately need to avoid being spotted.

Aayla nods, and walks through the ruins of the ceiling, and the wall buried behind.

\--

It is Plo Koon who first encounters Anakin Skywalker, slaughtering his way to the base of the Council spire, a wave of blasterfire behind him.

 _So Mace was right_ , Plo thinks bitterly. _He betrayed us after all_.

Mace had spent months with headaches caused by the enormous shatterpoint he had seen laid over Anakin Skywalker. He had seen danger in it, had protested Anakin’s appointment to the Council.

But the Council had yielded to the Chancellor’s request. To _politics_. And Plo was one of Anakin’s primary defenders. The memory tastes bitter on his tongue.

All around Anakin, the ghosts of Jedi rush and linger. They charge him, his battalion; they yell and they curse and they beg for him to stop; they yell advice to those he’s cutting down, Jedi after Jedi, but that advice is only seldom heard, and never enough to help.

Plo doesn’t know if he can make himself seen and heard by the Jedi, but not by Skywalker. Making himself visible to only Force sensitives is very different from appearing only to some of them.

But Anakin’s eyes burn with the rancid yellow of the Dark Side, and Plo has to try.

He is only of the Light. The fleeing, falling Jedi are all of the Light, because somehow, even in the face of genocide and unprecedented slaughter, they have found the strength to fall without Falling, to die without Turning.

“Run!” Plo yells, imposing his will on the Force, begging it to show him only to his comrades. When Anakin doesn’t react, not even the slightest twitch, even as Plo stands in the path of his blade and watches it move through his image, he turns and calls, “We’re retreating into the Old Temple! Make your way there if you can, but _do not let him follow you there_.”

“Forget about us,” one of the Jedi growls, meeting Plo’s eyes. A Padawan. And not a senior one.

Anakin scoffs loudly, thinking the comment directed at him. “You wish,” he says, lightsaber cutting another Jedi clean in half.

“There are others behind us,” the Rodian says, this time addressing Anakin. She has seen that Anakin doesn’t see, knows the importance of preserving that ignorance. “You will never get to them. We will hold you here.”

It is bravado, and they all know it. Even the clones probably know it, but if they do, Plo can’t sense anything from them beyond _anger_ and _traitors_ and _kill_.

It’s what he sensed from his own men, his own _sons_ , half a second before his starfighter exploded around him.

The Rodian knows it too. But she is not telling Anakin and his men what she believes: she is telling Plo where he is needed.

Plo nods. And he leaves her and her line to die.

\--

Almost no one is in the Council Spire. That’s not unexpected—few occupy it, except those on the Council or going to see it, and all of those have been pulled down and into the fight. It is why Plo does not sense the ghosts of the Jedi who had gone to search the spires inside, and why he is not surprised.

But the Rodian had said there were others in the spire, so Plo must search.

It’s when he gets to the Council Chamber that he finds them: a dozen or so Initiates, painfully young. Somehow, they had seen the slaughter—or _sensed_ it, any Force sensitive with any training at all would have—and managed to get away, stay together, and lock themselves in one of the most secure rooms in the Temple.

It might even have worked, Plo reflects, trying to stifle his bitterness in case Force ghosts could Fall too. It might even have worked, if they hadn’t just named Anakin Skywalker to the Council.

“Young ones,” Plo says, snapping into sight. The children all jump, but half-relax as soon as they identify him as a Council member.

They look up at him, beseeching. Trusting. Trusting him to save them, to somehow make this right, when he has already failed to save so many.

But these children, Plo decides, he _will_ save.

“Follow me,” he says, “we are not safe here. The invaders are on the way.”

Fear, from the children. Plo has to keep them moving.

The lifts are not safe to take, not when they are probably shut down from the damage, and especially not given Anakin’s skill with technology. The Council Spire has stairs, of course, though few beings take them, but even those are not safe.

There is, however, a series of maintenance shafts and vents that some early rendition of the Council had equipped with ladders, to serve as an emergency exit. Plo doesn’t know what type of emergency they anticipated, but he is desperately grateful they anticipated _something_. The Initiates are far, far too young to be able to levitate themselves down the vents otherwise, and Plo is one with the Force, unable to help them.

And even better, given the recency of Anakin’s appointment to the Council, their resident traitor probably doesn’t know the shafts exist. Or that they drop straight down into the Old Temple itself.

\--

The journey down is harrowing. Plo is floating down alongside the children, as he had floated up through the floors of the spire, murmuring encouragements as they go. But it can only help so much, and the children are crying as they climb farther and farther down. Both the trauma and the strain of such a long descent are too much for them to handle.

But finally they make it.

There’s just one problem: They can’t just go into the Old Temple, which plenty of Jedi frequent, and which the clones, Plo could feel as they passed through, had already swept. No, they need to go to the very base of the Old Temple, its long-abandoned depths.

Those depths are abandoned because down there is the Temple that had belonged to the Sith.

It’s not, therefore, a good place for traumatized, Force sensitive children. But it’s all they have.

Plo would love to reunite with the other Jedi who have made it, see with his own eyes everyone who has managed to survive, make sure the Initiates had actual, living defenders. But it’s too risky. If Anakin notices how many have fled, or has maintained enough sanity in the grip of a recent Fall to check the security footage, he might find them. There are ways out of the base of the Temple, yes, but they need to be careful.

And the remaining Jedi need to stay separate, to increase the chance that some will survive.

The children keep crying as Plo leads them on, desperately trying to remember long-ago-memorized schematics that would show the way out. Several times, he has to leave them behind to scout ahead. The ancient sections of the Temple are notoriously labyrinthine, and the architecture the pass through could belong to ten different buildings—and, in a way, had. Expansive facades of the palest stone, which would be airy if not for the utter darkness, give way to the durasteel wartime facades of the ancient Temple, every piece of architecture designed with an eye toward defense.

Navigating it is hard, and harder for the Initiates, who cannot yet both shield themselves and use the Force to sense their surroundings. Still, Plo is thankful that the empathic nature of Force sensitive children requires shields be among the first lesson. Otherwise, even the ancient auras of Light and Dark permeating the ancient levels would not be enough to conceal their location.

Plo is even more thankful that the old Sith Temple is at the center of the mountain the Jedi Temple rests upon—and thus in the opposite direction of the Temple walls, and their exit.

That is one trial the children will not have to brave.

\--

Aayla lights the way for the children following her, Trisn and Gwiu’s glows adding to her own, along with the ghosts of the Initiates who had followed them. The faint blue light they seem to emit by default is the only thing lighting the way ahead, aside from the handful of lightsabers the still-living children possess.

Aayla had told a few of the Initiates to grab the lightsabers of their fallen comrades and crechemates before they escaped. It had made her almost sick to do so, even as intangible as she was. Even beyond the practical graverobbing, all her training left her with the sure knowledge of how badly it could go, to let the children who hadn’t yet been granted lightsabers fight in combat. But they were desperate.

The ghosts of the children who had died in defense of the group, at least, don’t appear too resentful of the continued use of their lightsabers. Pained, even more so than they were before, but not resentful.

They pass through another once-exterior wall of the Temple, this one fashioned entirely of something that looks like glass. The different sections of the curved wall reflect back slightly different colors of black—red-black, blue-black, silver-black—but it is nothing to what it must have looked like a thousand years ago, shot through by the Coruscanti sun and stars.

The section beyond, though, is clearly war-built, and Aayla is pained to admit how much that architecture comforts her as she winds the children through narrow corridor after narrow corridor, bottlenecks frequent and notches everywhere, designed to give cover from enemy fire.

Of course, the defenses are all intended to aid whichever force is farther _inside_ the Temple, but Aayla refuses to let herself think about that. After all, improvising is what Aayla does best.

Later, by what might have been minutes or might have been hours, they reach a new section, sandstone-pale in the flow of their dead. It’s not as airy as some of the areas they have already passed, but it’s far more open than the defensive walls they have just left. The path forward is far more clear, and soon they reach the next exterior wall.

And this one, Aayla knows immediately, actually _is_ the exterior.

She and Trisn split off, leaving Gwiu to watch over the children. The oldest is maybe twelve, but there are few still living at that age, and the youngest is six at the absolute most.

Of course, the ghost children need to be watched over too.

The sooner Aayla finds a door, a tunnel, a window, a vent, _anything_ that leads to the outside, the happier she’ll be.

Once they leave the Temple, they’ll be in the Lower Levels of Coruscant. That’s its own problem, but Aayla trained under Quinlan Vos, and that sort of problem is Aayla’s specialty.

\--

Aayla finds an old, exterior window. It’s sealed up from the outside, but Aayla floats through the wall, and the duracrete there is thinner. Nothing a lightsaber can’t fix. And even better, the alleyway outside is dark, dirty, and completely deserted.

That dark alley is the first light of real hope Aayla’s had in hours. Running-floating as she can, she is back with the group in seconds, and calling back Gwiu moments later.

The children huddle around the ancient, ancient glass as the oldest Initiate slowly carves through it, and the duracrete above.

And then they’re free.

\--

With the confidence of long experience, Aayla leads the children through the labyrinth of the Lower Levels. There are twenty-eight still alive. Those without cloaks, she makes remove their tabards. Those with lightsabers, she instructs in how to palm them, grateful child-sized lightsabers can generally be shoved up child-sized sleeves. Then she makes them scrape their remaining clothes along the filthy wall of the alley, both to disguise the distinctive Temple outlets, and because anything too clean will not blend in.

It is perhaps a small mercy that none of them have Padawan braids for Aayla to make them sever.

The trek through the alley is long, and several times Aayla is forced to steel herself as she splits up the children, because thirty children traveling alone can only attract attention. And they cannot risk remaining close to the Temple.

They walk and hide and sneak for hours, until every child who can is drawing on the Force to keep going, and some who can are carrying those who can’t. Aayla has given them breaks, where she could, but their lives are still at risk, so they have to keep moving.

But finally, finally, they are what Aayla judges to be far enough, and well beyond the margin of error on that guess. She scouts and hunts and finds them a place to hide. She talks one of the Initiates through hacking the lock on an old, abandoned apartment, one thankfully free of squatters, and unfortunately picked over of any and all resources or amenities. But it’s private.

“Just like that,” she murmurs to the oldest, “hands steady, just keep stripping the wire.” The oldest is indeed twelve, Aayla has learned on their journey. They’re named Zdenka, they’re a Cathar, and they had been pretty sure that one of the Masters had been about to take them on as a Padawan, before the attack.

Zdenka touches the stripped wire to the circuit on the edge of the keypad, then jumps back and furiously pads at the sparks that shoot out and land on their mane.

No technology in this part of Coruscant is in any decent condition, much less abandoned technology.

But as the sparks shoot out, the door opens. Aayla waves the Initiates over from the alleyway where they’re hiding, adjacent to the alleyway that she and Zdenka are already in. There’s almost nothing but alleys so far down in Coruscant either, but Aayla mastered blending into those shadows long before she became functionally invisible. She can teach the Initiates to do the same.

(She refuses to think about Quinlan: the way he taught her, his laughter as he chased her through those same alleyways, the chances that he is still alive.)

The children climb into the filthy wreck of a shelter—though every indication is that it’s structurally sound—and clearly want to collapse. They can’t, though, Aayla can’t let them, not until they’ve covered the windows, barricaded the door, and created a back exit.

The children are young, but with the Force, it doesn’t take long. “We’ll keep watch,” Aayla says when they’re done, keeping her voice as smooth and reassuring as possible. “Try to get some sleep.”

Within minutes, the children are piled up against the far wall, their backs to its surface or pressed against each other’s bodies, afraid to push away, to let go. To be alone.

Some of them sleep, probably.

The dead children, however, cannot.


	2. Chapter 2

On Mandalore, there are no Jedi. The planet is in crisis, but the whole Galaxy is in crisis, and no one could be spared, so there is only Ahsoka Tano, teenaged former Padawan. Her, and several thousand clones.

Ahsoka lives, thanks to Rex’s skill and his foresight in cutting out his own chip. She feels the death of her once-people, the ones she has chosen to deny, the ones who had first denied her.

She does not know about the strange, impossible phenomenon occurring throughout the Force, because there are no Jedi around her for her to see perish. And out of the three Jedi who would most have wanted to come to her, one is alive, one is evacuating the Temple, and one has become a Sith.

\--

Barriss is no longer a Jedi. She has been excommunicated from the Order for her crimes. It’s only the injustice that almost befell Ahsoka that has her still trapped in a cell, for the months her trial drags on.

That doesn’t save her from the prison’s clone guards. The troopers stationed in the prison are not added to the Temple raid, for obvious reasons, and so when Order 66 comes through, the first thing they do is march to her cell and shoot her dead.

\--

Caleb Dume is only saved from Order 66 by his Master’s quick reflexes. She lunges, grabs him, diverts the blaster bolts aimed at him before he even realizes they’re coming. He takes a second to move, still caught up in the vision of the Jedi dying throughout the Galaxy, one after another after another but all within seconds, or the space of a thought.

His friends are shooting at him. He forces himself to bring up his lightsaber, when Depa tells him to either run or fight, and he reflects the blasts that kill Soot and Big-Mouth. He’d shared his dessert with them two days ago, and now they’re trying to kill him.

He runs. He knows his Master is lying to him even as he does, her _I’ll be right behind you_ echoing hollowly in his ears. But he runs.

He still sees them shoot her down. Grey kills her. Her own commander shoots her in the head.

He freezes, like he always seems to freeze, like he’s frozen too many times that night.

But then he shakes it off, turns and runs. His Master had just died _to save him_. He needs to get out of there, or else he’ll collapse under the sheer weight of his uselessness and despair. He should have done something to save her, anything, but he didn’t. All he can do is run.

\--

Caleb Dume turns and runs, and seconds later Master Depa Billaba is shoved back out of the Force into which she had just started to dissolve. Her eyes widen in confusion and horror as she takes in the scene around her and the fact that there’s even a her to be aware of that scene. Blasterfire scorches burn in the grass, radios crackle as _her men_ launch a manhunt for her Padawan.

She knows, somehow, that she is dead.

Also, if the Force wasn’t practically it screaming at her…she’s standing over her own corpse.

But her body doesn’t matter. She doesn’t let herself react to its mutilation, the dozens of blaster shots the clones must have fired after she died. To make sure she stayed down, she supposes, and wonders distantly if she should take it as a compliment that they apparently thought the shot to the head was inconclusive. Or if they just hate her that much.

But what matters is Caleb. So she runs off in the direction she saw him retreat, and prays to the Force she wasn’t...dead…too long.

She finds him. And, thankfully, the clones do not. But she has an advantage they lack: she can sense Caleb’s presence in the Force, haphazardly shielded in his panic. She thinks she might never have found him otherwise: it’s a few hours past darkness, local time, and Caleb has buried himself under the exposed roots of a tree, covered in leaves and concealed by the undergrowth. The clones run right past him as Depa holds a breath she no longer can take. Instead she just feels tension in what would have been her lungs and throat, were she alive, as Caleb remains undetected.

Depa doesn’t think he can see her, and the thought could almost kill her again. Or worse—she’s struggled with the Dark Side before, and who knows if ghosts can Fall? She would think not, but she hadn’t even known ghosts existed until she became one.

The thought of having to watch as Caleb is hunted down, unable to help him or even just comfort him, let him know she’s there, is horrifying, but Depa can’t let it consume her.

Instead, she sits in a meditative posture. She isn’t sure if she’s managed to sit on the actual ground—if she has, she certainly can’t feel it.

She waits until enough time has passed that Caleb deems it safe, and slowly emerges from beneath the tree. Depa freezes at the rustle of the disturbed leaves, but nothing happens: her former soldiers are too far away to hear. Caleb extricates himself, and, with a deathgrip on his drawn lightsaber, heads off perpendicular to the line along with they had gone to search for him.

Depa follows him. It’s all she can do, at the moment. But if there’s a way to make herself visible, to let Caleb see and hear her once again, she will find it.

\--

None of the ghosts see Palpatine’s speech announcing them traitors, declaring them fugitives, responsible for a coup, to be _suppressed_ to be loyal clone troopers.

None of them see Palpatine anoint himself Emperor. None of them see democracy die.

But they will all find out.

\--

When Obi-Wan and Yoda sneak into the Temple, more than a day has passed, Coruscant-time, and most of the ghosts have left to aid the escapes of those still alive, whether on Coruscant or elsewhere in the Galaxy.

But some had remained, to sweep the Temple for survivors and warn any who returned about the Temple’s occupation, the troopers lying in wait.

(Those Jedi who lived long enough had tried to turn off the beacon with everything they had, but altering it required biometric authorization, and none of the few Jedi alive and still in the Temple after the initial Purge had that clearance.)

Obi-Wan and Yoda did not enter through the grand plaza, but if they had, Siri Tachi’s body would have been one of the first things they saw.

Instead, one of the first things they see is her spirit.

“Siri,” Obi-Wan forces out, unable to grasp why she is _still there_ , in potential danger, and also why she is tinted blue. “What are you doing—what happened?”

Siri shrugs in a way that is not remotely nonchalant. “I died,” she says. “Apparently.”

But both Obi-Wan and Yoda can feel it: how utterly different her Force presence is from the last time they had seen her.

“Impossible, this is,” Yoda says, even as he and Obi-Wan follow Siri’s lead, pulling them off to the side and further away from the main halls than they already were.

“Apparently not,” she replies, voice matter-of-fact. “I’m still here. All of us are still here, somehow—the second we die, our ghosts have been popping out.”

Obi-Wan’s face is tight and utterly blank. But he doesn’t let himself react to what’s happened—and that it’s happened to Siri in particular—any more than she is letting herself react to him, specifically.

He doesn’t let himself react at all. If he does, he thinks, he’ll never move again. Just stay trapped in the echo of endless death, forever.

“Who did this?” he asks instead. He knows it was the clones, that they attacked the Temple the same way his own men—his own _commander_ —had tried to attack him. He needs to know.

“The 501st,” Siri responds, mouth set and tight. Grimly determined, Obi-Wan reads through long experience. “I didn’t see it, but Master Koon says they were led by Anakin.”

Obi-Wan had not thought the situation could get any worse.

“We’re here to turn off the beacon,” Obi-Wan says, because he can’t acknowledge what Siri says. Can’t believe it. Not without proof, not after what had happened to Ahsoka, not when it would mean— “To replace it, with a message of our own.”

Siri simply nods. She won’t force the issue—she knows what this means to Obi-Wan. “I’ll scout ahead. And be warned—there are still troopers stationed in the Temple. He’s turned the whole thing into a trap.”

\--

The security footage shows the proof Obi-Wan had needed, and desperately had not wanted. Siri is a reassuring figure at his back, her presence in the Force solid where her body is not.

“We got out everyone we could,” she tells him and Yoda as they watch the slaughter. “About three hundred escaped.”

What none of them say: three hundred out of three thousand Jedi in-Temple is a cold comfort. Even more so is three hundred confirmed survivors out of ten thousand Jedi, total. Especially when those three hundred are still in danger.

Siri continues, “Mostly Padawans who were in-Temple without their Masters, for various reasons. Everyone mobile in the Healing Halls. A good number of Initiates and Knights.” She pauses. “No Masters.”

Because the Masters had died defending the rest.

“There will be more out in the Galaxy,” Siri says. “More survivors. And more ghosts.”

It’s something. But it’s not nearly enough.

\--

When Obi-Wan leaves the Temple, Siri goes with him.

“You can’t—” he starts to argue, but Siri just stares him down.

“I can be a scout for you, or I can be one of the thousand-plus capable scouts with the survivors.”

Siri does not, precisely, give him a choice. And when Obi-Wan stows away on Padmé’s ship, she joins him.

In a universe where the Force was more resilient, where it did not tear and warp and reject all incoming, Force-sensitive souls, the confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin ended in tragedy. Siri joining him doesn’t change that outcome; Obi-Wan had never needed her help to win.

But Siri’s presence does change one very important thing: Padmé survives.

In another world, the med droids had been unable to tell why she was dying. In this world, they are too, for the same reason: they don’t have the Force.

Obi-Wan and Yoda possess the Force, but the life-draining bond that is killing Padmé is so enshrouded, so subtle, that they cannot sense it, for all their power and control.

But Siri Tachi _is_ the Force.

As Padmé’s heartrate plummets and the doctors mutter something about her “losing the will to live,” Siri scoffs, because she feels Padmé’s lifeforce leaking out of her. Leaking _to_ somewhere.

“Shield her!” Siri yells.

Obi-Wan jumps, though Yoda does not. “What?” Obi-Wan asks.

“Something’s killing her through the Force!” Siri bites out. “Shield her mind and her lifeforce, and do it now!”

They do, quickly. And with two of the most powerful Masters of the Order shielding Padmé’s mind, the leak cuts off abruptly. Moments later, her heart rate stabilizes, then slowly starts to increase.

“Thank the Force,” Siri mutters.

“You, we thank,” Yoda replies, face even more scrunched than usual in his concentration.

Slowly, Siri lets herself smile, even as she knows they’re not out of the woods yet.

\--

It takes over a day before Padmé has sufficiently stabilized that Obi-Wan and Yoda feel safe even attempting to drop their shields.

As soon as they do, her heart rate plummets. Padmé falls limp against the sheets of the hospital bed.

The shields snap back up again, and she recovers again, as much as possible given the shock to her heart and the sheer amount of adrenaline in her system.

“Something in her mind, there must be,” Yoda says, tone heavy. “Root it out, we must.”

Obi-Wan maintains Padmé’s shields while Yoda delves into her mind. Siri keeps up a gentle, even patter of conversation with Padmé to keep her distracted and as calm as can be.

It takes hours and hours, but at last Yoda succeeds. “Thank the Force,” Bail exhales as he watches Padmé cradle her two beautiful babies.

\--

“Split up, they must be,” Yoda says, and Padmé rears back in horror.

“I am _their mother_ , and I _will not lose them_.” _Not after everything_ , Padmé doesn’t say, but they all hear it nonetheless.

But no amount of emotion will change the fact that it is beyond difficult to shield Force-sensitive infants, and nigh impossible to shield a pair of twins as powerful as Luke and Leia when they are together.

She argues with the Jedi for hours and hours. She does not speak to Obi-Wan or to Yoda outside of those arguments, even as they go about the business of covering their tracks. She barely contributes to the discussion of how they will fake her death.

“I think we got lucky,” Siri says. “I think that when the leech was snapped, it would have felt like you died. So that should be what the Emperor—” for they all know he’s the only one that can be behind this, presumably to the end of bringing Anakin further under his thumb “—believes happened. Meaning all we need is a corpse.”

They decide to perform facial reconstruction surgery on a corpse of Padmé’s size and weight, and to hope there is a suitable body in the med station for them to steal. Obi-Wan grimaces at the memory of the how such reconstruction feels, but cannot deny its effectiveness. The right mortician and a hefty bribe will bury any anatomical evidence, as well as make it seem that Padmé died still pregnant.

“But you’re not splitting them up,” Padmé says, voice like ice. “Not after I almost lost them.”

“ _Do not speak to us about loss_ ,” Obi-Wan snaps. Padmé’s eyes widen, in surprise and regret, but she is not about to back down.

Obi-Wan stills. Breathes. Quiet and unemotional as a stone, he says, “I apologize for my tone, Senator. But what we have told you is fact.” He turns on his heel. “If you’ll excuse me.”

\--

Padmé relents. Losing one of her children to a safe home is far, far worse than losing them both to the Emperor.

So Bail takes Leia. And Padmé and Obi-Wan head to the last of Anakin’s family, and the one place he will never set foot: Tatooine.

(Padmé wishes beyond words she could return to her own family, hide with them, let them meet her children, be _near_ them. But Naboo is the Emperor’s homeworld, and the cannot know if he is certain of her death. They cannot take that risk.)

\--

Anakin would have hated that Luke is being raised on Tatooine, and Padmé knows it. It’s hard, living there and knowing what the planet had done to her husband. But between Luke’s apparently astonishing power and their own fame, she and Obi-Wan had not had a lot of choices.

\--

The ghosts follow them to Tatooine. They don’t usually make themselves visible to her, but Padmé knows they seldom leave Obi-Wan alone. At least one of them is usually there, although judging by the fact that Obi-Wan doesn’t spend _that much_ time talking to thin air, they’re usually pretty quiet.

Padmé tends to think that’s for the best. Obi-Wan clearly needs support, support she is just as clearly incapable of giving him, dealing with all of her grief and her new status as a widow and a parent and an anonymous peasant of Tatooine. But he’s also not up for much conversation, unless she’s missed her guess—and when it comes to people, she rarely does.

(Or is that true? After all, she would _never_ have imagined Anakin could—could—)

The two Jedi that stay with Obi-Wan the most have introduced themselves to her: Bant Eerin and Siri Tachi. They were both close friends of Obi-Wan’s since childhood, they tell her. Privately, Padmé thinks that Obi-Wan and Siri might have been something more, once upon a time, but she no longer trusts her judgement in such matters at all. And either way, she’d never find out from Obi-Wan—

— _Ben_ , she’s supposed to call him Ben, and call herself Jaylin.

(She struggles with both of these changes. Luke, at least, can remain Luke, but he can be neither Luke Skywalker nor Luke Naberrie, not when a famous name could prompt someone to take too close a look at his guardians.)

She is Jaylin Whitesun, a cousin of Beru’s made refugee by the war. Left destitute enough that Tatooine looked like a good destination, especially when it housed the only family she had left.

(She can’t contact her parents or her sisters on Naboo, even though letting them think she’s dead kills her inside. But if Palpatine is half as paranoid and skilled at manipulation as it would take to pull of his Galactic coup, he will be watching her family’s communications, and he will be watching them.)

Obi-Wan is also a Whitesun, because he’d gotten half-way through a comment about keeping the name Kenobi before she’d shot him down. Because he’s even more famous than her, and would be near the top of Palpatine’s most wanted Jedi list, and Tatooine might be on the Outer Rim but it’s not _actually_ in a different Galaxy.

(And if she has to change her name, then so does he.)

She’s allegedly the Whitesun by blood because she is the one who had actually married Anakin, who had officially joined Beru’s family. And those ties matter on Tatooine, with a strength they don’t most places, since on Tatooine, those blood ties are all too often in danger of being torn away by slavery.

Also, she and Obi-Wan gave Owen and Beru a fair amount of the actual details of their situation, and Owen very much blames Obi-Wan for Anakin’s death, and the death of Owen’s last tie to his stepmother.

 _“Haven’t you killed enough Skywalkers?”_ he’d asked, and Obi-Wan had refused to go near Owen for weeks, with the determined nonchalance of a dedicated negotiator who will never, ever admit that’s what he’s doing.

Padmé, they had met in a context outside Anakin’s death, and besides, she’s his widow—that counts for something, buys her sympathy, whereas they have no built-in paradigms through which to understand Obi-Wan’s relationship to Anakin.

Also, the screaming fight that had ended in Obi-Wan avoiding Owen had started when Obi-Wan had dropped the word _Master_.

So a month into their arrival on Tatooine, Padmé has a house near the Lars’s, a new name, and a new brother-in-law. (Obi-Wan, because she needs to explain their relationship, but Beru won’t call him a direct relative, and Padmé cannot bring herself to call him her husband, ever, for any cause. When people ask why he’s taken her name, Padmé shares a well-rehearsed lie about the paperwork needed to escape the Republic.)

She has a new job (moisture farmer), a new wardrobe (plain, loose, light for the heat, and nigh-incapable of attracting attention), and a cadre of invisible Jedi ghosts that sometimes help her with Luke.

It’s not the life she imagined. But at least she’s still there to live it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! FYI this year I'm participating in Fandom Trumps Hate, a fundraiser for an awesome list of organizations that help people and communities targeted by the current US administration's hatred and bigoted policies. I'm especially glad to participate as a trans person, and I've signed up to donate two fics and a round of beta-reading! FYI these works are NOT being sold; like all fan creations donated, are a thank you gift in exchange for a charitable donation, and no one but the charities ever even touches any donations--and as a result they're in-keeping with Fair Use policies.
> 
> Currently the offered works are all up for browsing, and bidding opens February 26th. So check it out--and you could even get a custom fic by me out of it ;)


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